The Shakespeare Guild is pleased to invite you to three programs in Manhattan’s beautiful Gramercy Park, two at the National Arts Club and one next door at The Players, where you’ll have an opportunity to meet and talk with one of today’s most eminent Shakespeare scholars, DAVID SCOTT KASTAN of Yale University, and with two of our era’s most distinguished actors, ZOE CALDWELL and STACY KEACH. We’re also delighted to offer you a discount on tickets for Theatre for a New Audience’s staging of John Ford’s THE BROKEN HEART at the Duke Theatre.

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SPECIAL DISCOUNT FOR ‘THE BROKEN HEART’

FEBRUARY 4 THROUGH MARCH 4

THE DUKE THEATRE, 229 West 42nd Street, Manhattan

Guild Constituents $52.50 (Regularly $75.00)

If you saw Alexis Soloski’s New York Times article, “Extreme Theater: Wake-Up Calls from the 1600s”

you’re aware that playgoers in Manhattan and Brooklyn are looking forward to attending two rarely-produced tragedies by 17th-century dramatist John Ford. One, THE BROKEN HEART, figured prominently in a fascinating National Arts Club discussion on January 11. JEFFREY HOROWITZ, whose visionary leadership has enabled such pioneering artists as Mark Rylance and Julie Taymor to do seminal work at Theatre for a New Audience, introduced SELINA CARTMELL, a brilliant new Irish director, to an NAC gathering that was eager to hear about her first production in New York. She and Mr. Horowitz spoke with the Shakespeare Guild’s John Andrews about what makes Ford plays like ‘TIS PITY TO BE A WHORE (soon to be revived at BAM) resonate with renewed intensity. Ms. Cartmell and a distinguished cast are now putting the finishing touches on a show that opens tomorrow, and constituents of the Guild are eligible to obtain $75 tickets for only $52.50. To take advantage of this generous discount, simply log on to www.dukeon42.org or call 646-223-3010, using code SHG2760 when you place your order. For details about the show, visit www.tfana.org.

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A CHAT WITH YALE’S DAVID SCOTT KASTAN

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 27, at 8:00 p.m.

NATIONAL ARTS CLUB, 15 Gramercy Park South, Manhattan

Guild Constituents $25

DAVID KASTAN is the first American scholar to serve as a General Editor of The Arden Shakespeare, a prestigious collection of the complete works that has been Britain’s standard-bearer for more than a century. A distinguished professor of English at Yale University, Mr. Kastan has also earned plaudits for his work at Dartmouth and Columbia. His many publications include Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (1982), Shakespeare After Theory (1999), and Shakespeare and the Book (2001). Mr. Kastan co-edited Staging the Renaissance: Essays on Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (1991) and The New History of Early English Drama (1997), and he is the sole editor of Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” (1995), A Companion to Shakespeare (1999), The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature (2006), and other volumes. This spring he’ll be overseeing a major celebration of “Shakespeare at Yale,” a festival that will highlight such resources as the library’s outstanding collection of early quarto and folio printings and the university’s highly regarded repertory theater.

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A CONVERSATION WITH ZOE CALDWELL

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, at 7:00 p.m.

THE PLAYERS, 16 Gramercy Park South, Manhattan

Guild Constituents $25

In her latest triumph ZOE CALDWELL has been riveting audiences, and garnering critical praise, as a cold-hearted Upper East Side matron in David Adjmi’s intimidatingly intimate Elective Affinitives. Meanwhile she has been moving filmgoers as an affectionate grandmother in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, one of this year’s Academy Award nominees for Best Picture. Long admired for her commanding stage presence, Ms. Caldwell has earned four Tony Awards, most recently as Maria Callas in Terrence McNally’s Master Class. She has portrayed such heroines as Lady Macbeth and Medea, not to mention Lillian Hellman and Miss Jean Brodie, and she has worked with such legends as Dame Judith Anderson, Dame Edith Evans, Sir Tyrone Guthrie, Charles Laughton, and Paul Robeson. She has also directed some of the greatest stars in the profession, among them Eileen Atkins, Glenda Jackson, James Earl Jones, Christopher Plummer, and Vanessa Redgrave. Ms. Caldwell is now writing a sequel to I Will Be Cleopatra, a charming memoir about her early years in Australia, and she’ll share a few delightful passages about her most memorable encounters with Shakespeare.

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A CONVERSATION WITH STACY KEACH

TUESDAY, MARCH 20, at 8:00 p.m.

NATIONAL ARTS CLUB, 15 Gramercy Park South, Manhattan

Guild Constituents $25

STACY KEACH is currently starring in Broadway’s acclaimed Other Desert Cities. Best known to many of his television fans as Mickey Spillane detective Mike Hammer, Mr. Keach is also familiar for such popular films as Brewster McCloud, Doc, Judge Roy Bean, That Championship Season, and The New Centurians. But what he finds most satisfying is the Shakespearean acting he has done in such classic roles as Falstaff, Henry V, Macbeth, Mercutio, and Richard III. Clive Barnes, who observed a number of superb Hamlets during his many years as drama critic for the New York Times, has commented that the best ever “was Keach, whose neurotic passion and fierce poetry were quite wonderful.” Described by one reviewer as “the finest American classical actor since John Barrymore,” Mr. Keach has received a Best Actor Golden Globe, three Obies, three Vernon Rice Awards, three Helen Hayes Awards (among them for his portrayal of Richard Nixon in the national touring production of Frost/Nixon and for his King Lear at the Shakespeare Theatre Company), and multiple nominations for Emmy and Tony awards.